Troy Trailer

Troy

In year 1250 B.C. during the late Bronze age, two emerging nations begin to clash. Paris, the Trojan prince, convinces Helen, Queen of Sparta, to leave her husband Menelaus, and sail with him back to Troy. After Menelaus finds out that his wife was taken by the Trojans, he asks his brother Agamemnom to help him get her back. Agamemnon sees this as an opportunity for power. So they set off with 1,000 ships holding 50,000 Greeks to Troy. With the help of Achilles, the Greeks are able to fight the never before defeated Trojans.

David Sterritt

Jack Mathews

A "Ben-Hur"-size epic with beefcake, beauty, outsize heroes, flashy duels and epic battles. There are breathtaking vistas, taut political intrigues, dangerous romantic liaisons and one of the greatest wardrobes ever assembled for a costume drama.

Mick LaSalle

Claudia Puig

Sara Brady

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy recalls an age when Hollywood not only gambled on but flourished with grandiose epics and casts of thousands, and brings megawatt star power to what is, at root, a brilliantly told story.

Stephen Hunter

Stanley Kauffmann

When a spectacular film rests on at least a minimal armature of character and cogent action, as Troy does, we can just sink back and enjoy. What we enjoy is the sovereignty over time and place and the force of gravity that film has given to the world.

Will Lawrence

Peter Rainer

Except for a few brilliant flashes, mostly from Peter O'Toole as Hectors father, the Trojans' magisterially woebegone King Priam, Troy is a fairly routine action picture with an advanced case of grandeuritis.

Bill Gallo

Homer would be hard-pressed to find any remaining shred of "The Iliad" in this over-the-top entertainment. It has a lot of loud passion but not much poetry, and that's appropriate for a movie that could well be subtitled My Big Fat Greek Bloodletting.

Dana Stevens

For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.

Todd McCarthy

Despite a sensationally attractive cast and an array of well-staged combat scenes presented on a vast scale, Wolfgang Petersen's highly telescoped rendition of the Trojan War lurches ahead in fits and starts for much of its hefty running time, to OK effect.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O'Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic.

Karen Karbo

In the end, the battle scenes are elegant and compelling and there are some fine moments when O'Toole, as Priam, summons his inner Lawrence of Arabia and makes us believe that we're actually watching a tragic altercation that brought down great men descended from gods.

Roger Ebert

Ty Burr

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

Maitland McDonagh

Rick Kisonak

Wolfgang Petersen's popcorn epic doesn't fail exactly. It just takes on too much. Modern man is at something of a disadvantage-even aided by his trusty muse, the computer-when presuming to bring the stuff of gods, myths and timeless sacred texts to the big screen.

Kenneth Turan

Given everything, it's no surprise that the verdict on the film has to be a split decision. Troy is a movie you believe in physically...Believing in Troy emotionally, however, presents a greater challenge.

Stephanie Zacharek

Jonathan Foreman

What really wrecks Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is some of the worst casting in recent Hollywood history: The lackluster ensemble hired by the director is overwhelmed by the generally impressive sets and crowd scenes, by the task of playing epic heroes and by David Benioff's rambling, tone-deaf screenplay "inspired by Homer's 'Iliad.'"

Scott Foundas

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.